Review: The Hand That Cradles The Rock by Gaslight Baker Theatre
by Michael Meigs
Billy Alexander is beleaguered and bemused throughout this cheery piece of Canadian froth, now playing at the Gaslight Baker Theatre in Lockhart.
As the stay-at-home writer Ross Cameron, he's a Mr. Mom surrounded by women: his wife the successful industrial designer, the friendly home care nurse Miss Bricker from the Canadian public health service, and his flighty mother-in-law Beattie, still a dish after all these years. Oh, and his infant daughter, offstage. We never see her but she does generate comic demands on her dad, who is slowly going diaper-pail pablum stir-crazy in their house out in the remote Canadian woods.
The plot is a little bit color-by-the-numbers. Writer Warren Graves piles on top of the gender role reversal a series of funny bits about the frustration of Cameron's libido, and then introduces that wide-eyed pretty nurse just as Cameron's wife Alexandra is back from three weeks of travel and crashing on an important design project (left) . Mom-in-law Beattie and her droll companion George swing by regularly for comic relief and a tipple.
Inevitably, when Alexandra travels for a presentation, bad weather and good luck bring that cute Miss Bricker into Cameron's house. An aspiring author of romance fiction, she has lent Cameron the draft of her first novel, written in hot pink prose.
Will they or won't they? And what will be the consequences?
The answers to those two questions aren't really important, but they justify the ensuing nonsense. The Gaslight Baker fields an attractive and capable cast, and director Tysha Calhoun puts them through their paces at a happy canter.
Maggie Bell as Alexa (above) is lithe, concentrated and very attractive; as the innuendos and unanswered questions pile up in the second act, her perplexity and tentative indignation are very funny.
Her foil is Kelsey McManus as nurse Bricker (right), equally good looking but with stars in her eyes and an impulsive admiration for the successful writer. McManus plays physical comedy with just the right innocernt guile -- for example, when in the middle of the night, wrapped in a blanket and befuddled with sleep and drink, she answers a telephone call from Cameron's wife.
Ellen Massey as mom-in-law is zippy and frank. Ted Patterson's dead-pan delivery as George her companion is very effective. His affection for the brandy rings truthful and comic, and it is not overplayed.
Billy Alexander in the principal role as Ross Cameron carries the action throughout. We're immediately sympathetic to him. Cameron has lots to complain about, but Alexander does so with a wry tolerance and concealed good humor. The comedy might have been sharper and the jokes more surprising if played with some waspishness, but I'll trade that any day for Alexander's humanity.
Once again the theatre has mounted a meticulously crafted full-stage set, decorated with taste and an eye for detail. Tysha Calhoun's blocking of the action uses that space smoothly and well -- I particularly noted the repeated, apt and effective use of "deep field" positioning, in which a character downstage faces fully toward the audience and dialogues with another character behind him, positioned well upstage so to assure clear sightlines. Some particularly nice bits of business were George's prestidigitation with the brandy snifters and Cameron's expressive gestures when talking foolishly about his yearning for "an orgy with a couple of good-looking girls."
One minor observation: this is all played in the Canadian winter, and at times that fact seems to have been magicked away. Nurse Bricker walks into the house on her first visit wearing a pair of Crocs, for example, and other visitors may or may not arrive in winter wraps. Given that a key plot development depends on Nurse Bricker arriving half-frozen one lonely evening, some earlier establishinig business might have helped set that up.
Thanks to Tysha Calhoun for making sure that ALT kept Lockhart theatre on the review schedule!
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The Hand That Cradles The Rock
by Warren Graves
Gaslight Baker Theatre
